"I'm gonna try to get some sleep," she said, putting her head back and closing her eyes.
Shane could smell her perfume again; it drifted across the aisle like a carefully thrown net.
"Mayweather's dad was a cop in Illinois," she said unexpectedly, without opening her eyes. "I didn't know that."
"Yeah," Shane said. "Just another grunt in a blue suit, out there hookin' and bookin' assholes for the city."
"My dad was a cop in Hartford, Connecticut," she said, her eyes still closed. "He was a patrol cop but never made sergeant. Couldn't take tests. He froze every time he went up for the exam."
"Oh," Shane said, trying to picture her father. What must he and Mrs. Hamilton have been like to have produced this iron-willed yet exotic-looking creature?
"Did you have brothers or sisters?" he asked, hoping she would open up. After a long moment:
"Two brothers." She started slowly, then it seemed important for her to tell him more. "I was the youngest. My mom died in childbirth. For a long time I thought that was my fault. We had pictures of her all over the house. It was like a shrine. My brothers and I, we tried to imagine what it would have been like to have her around. I used to wonder if she was in heaven looking down, mad at me for causing her death, so I tried to make her happy by doing all the chores: cleaning up after Dad and my two brothers, doing dishes, washing clothes, trying to take her place but knowing I never could." She stopped, the memory somewhat painful, then went on. "Dad remarried when I was fifteen, and we got Karen, who was nice but kind of distant. It was like Dad's three kids were some sort of mistake that she was forced to accept in the deal. I went to college on a track scholarship at UCLA sprints and hurdles. I was there about ten years after Mayweather, but they still talked about him on Bruin Sports Radio, particularly during Bruin basketball games. He was a big deal, even years after he graduated. They all said he should have made the pros, but he ended up on the police force instead…
"It felt shitty watching him plead and beg down there… Somebody special that everybody looked up to turns out to be a self-centered shitball. Down there in that tunnel, I lost something. I don't know why it should affect me, but it does."
He was looking at her, wondering if she was ever going to open her eyes.
"Is that enough personal history?" she said, shining her blues at him again.
"Are you mad at me for some reason?" he asked. "You seem pissed off."
She sat still for several moments.
"Yeah… I guess I am. I wanted this career, wanted to believe in it. I wanted Mayweather to be stand-up. I actually liked him once. Respected him. Life is full of disappointments. I'll get over it. I wanted Santa Claus to come down the chimney with toys made at the North Pole especially for me."
He studied her, his dark, intense eyes trading her amp for amp.
"But just so you don't get the wrong idea, Shane, I don't think it's your fault this is happening. You just got put in the soup. You didn't ask for this any more than I did. It happened to you, and I'm in this with you because to do anything else is unthinkable."
There was a long silence. He was trying to think of the right thing to say. Finally he just smiled.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're welcome."
They didn't speak again until they landed.
Before he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he glanced over at her. Her shoes were off, feet up on the seat facing her, those restless ice-blue lasers sheathed now. She was breathing rhythmically, sleeping peacefully.
He tried to picture her as a child, a little girl wondering if she'd killed her mother during her own birth, carrying that burden around with her. Just as he'd carried the idea that he had not meant enough to his own parents to have them hold on to him even for one day. He'd been left at the hospital like trash put out by the back door.
He had often tried to picture his parents… Who were they? Did they go to college? Were they just teenagers who got careless and conceived him in a drive-in movie and decided to run? Were they hicks from Alabama, driving a pickup and drinking sour mash from a jug, with no money to raise him? Was he part Jewish or Italian or Irish? Did his mom and dad ever think about him and feel bad about what they'd done?
Why had they left him without even a first name pinned to his shirt?
He'd spent his life struggling to move past it, struggling to overcome it, finally using Chooch as a way to pull himself up, until he discovered that Chooch had become more important to him than the whole tired problem that had been weighing him down in the first place.
Alexa had been struggling, too. Internal Affairs was the perfect place for her. Weeding out the bad ones, making another house clean, all the time looking up, wondering if her mother hated her… wondering if she was good enough to be forgiven.
He admired her for it, but it also made him sad.
The sound of the huge jet engines hypnotically hummed in his ear. I wonder if, despite all that's happening, I'm actually beginning to feel something important for this woman.
Then Shane Scully, whose first given name was Infant 205, finally closed his eyes and went to sleep.
Shane dreamed about Chooch. The boy was on a vast beach, flying a kite over the ocean, but the kite was all black and dipping dangerously, diving toward the surface before straightening up again. Each time it seemed to get lower and lower.
"Shane, help me!" he was yelling. "It's going to crash!" Shane was moving toward him, but the faster he ran, the farther away Chooch i emed to be. If Shane didn't stop the kite's wild flight, he knew it would all end in disaster.
Chapter 45
MIAMI was baking in heat, the temperature in the mid-nineties, the humidity intense. They walked down the steps of the Gulfstream 3 into an invisible wall of moisture. A rent-a-car arranged by the FBO in Miami was waiting for them a bright yellow Thunderbird. Shane signed for it; then, after locking the suitcase containing the rest of the money in the trunk, he got the map of Miami out of the glove compartment and looked for the Coral Reef Yacht Club. It was a large piece of property marked on the map in orange, located east of Highway 1, south of the wealthy town of Coral Gables.
"You navigate, I'll drive," he said to Alexa, getting behind the wheel.
The car was a hardtop, and somebody had been chain-smoking in it. The unpleasant smell of old tobacco hung over them, wet and onerous. The air conditioner needed Freon and put out a stream of tepid air. They pulled out, and she directed him to Seventh Avenue, which turned into Cutter Road.
The sky was that special tinsel-blue that you can only get in Miami, where the land is so flat that no pollution can stay trapped above the city, instead blowing across the state, dissipating in the ocean breeze, leaving Miami glistening in bright sunshine and mirrored glass architecture.
Clouds floated by intermittently, huge white formations of indescribable beauty moving slowly across the flat horizon like whipped-cream galleons.
The Coral Reef Yacht Club was just down the road from the U. S. Department of Agriculture's Plant Introduction Station. The yacht club sat on man-made levees and fronted a dredged ocean cut that was enclosed on three sides. Nestled among this lush marine setting were clusters of old Florida-style buildings made of coral bricks, with overhanging eaves. Boats of all shapes and sizes were moored at dock fingers in front of the exclusive club.
Shane pulled through an open gate with a guardhouse but no guard. The parking lot was jammed; he finally found a spot way down by the docks. There were several news vans parked a hundred yards away, by the main building.
Shane and Alexa got out of the Thunderbird and moved up a crushed-gravel drive, where they found a man leaning against one of the mobile units, having a smoke.